Worship as Dialogue: Confession of Sin & Assurance of God's Love
Our worship service is a conversation between God and us. God speaks to us by his Word in Scripture and moves upon us by his Holy Spirit in inwardly apply the grace of the gospel. He engages us not just in our minds, but in all of our senses to confirm that we are not our own, but we belong to Him and that He is for us. And we are reoriented to see our lives in light of God’s redeeming work.
As we hear him call us and praise him in song, we quickly realize that we do not come to worship unburdened. We aren’t blank slates. We come carrying the weight of the world on our shoulders—the weight of our sin, the weight of other’s sin against us, and the heaviness of the spiritual darkness of our world. We come to worship in need of cleansing.
This is why we have built-in to our worship service a time for us to quiet our hearts before God, bringing the very worst we have to him without fear that we will be condemned or turned away—because he has told us exactly what he does with our sin: he takes it away.
During our confession of sin time, we do not list every wrong thing we’ve done because our hope isn’t that we can list all of our sins. Our hope is not in our memories.
We do not trust in our intentions, as if forgiveness will be ours because we really mean it this time (after all, if I didn’t have mixed motives, I don’t know if I’d have any motives at all).
We don’t confess privately and individually to a priest, because forgiveness is not just or even primarily an individual experience.
No. We confess our sin together, silently where we are, trusting in God’s promise to cleanse us of all unrighteousness, forgive us, and make us new. Our hope is in the magnitude of his grace and intentions for us. In confession we are not wallowing in guilt or shame, we are admitting that all of us need the same grace of God.
That’s exactly what we have pronounced on us in the second part of this movement of Confession & Assurance: the assurance of God’s love for us from Scripture.
Confessing sin and receiving assurance of God’s love for us together means a number of things. It means that there are no levels of righteousness in the church. All who are righteous in God’s sight are righteous by faith and not works—receiving and resting on the sufficiency of Jesus’ work for us.
It means that we don’t have any say in who receives God’s grace alongside us. This is what Jesus was emphasizing when he taught his disciples to pray “forgive our debts as we forgive our debtors.” To receive God’s grace means to, in turn, give grace. Imperfectly, for sure. But grace gives birth to grace.
So confess your sins. But do not trust in your ability to perfectly confess every wrong thing you’ve thought, said, or done. Do not stay in guilt and shame—that is not what God is calling you to when you confess. Come to him with your worst, and receive his best: an inexhaustible fountain of goodness that is yours and will not fail to not only forgive you, but transform you to the uttermost and make you new.